Critic Quotes

A man needs to look, not down, but up to standards set so much above his ordinary self as to make him feel that he is himself spiritually the underdog.

Tell him, on the contrary, that he needs, in the interest of his own happiness, to walk in the path of humility and self-control, and he will be indifferent, or even actively resentful.

For behind all imperialism is ultimately the imperialistic individual, just as behind all peace is ultimately the peaceful individual.

When I was a graduate student, the leading spirits at Harvard were interested in the history of ideas.

The theories of the major philosophers of the 18th century secular enlightenment were biblical and theological in spite of themselves.

The survival of artistic modes in which we recognize ourselves, identify ourselves and place ourselves will survive as long as humanity survives.

John Updike is always fun. And one of my former students, Tom Pynchon. And Harold Bloom, another former student.

It's amazing how, age after age, in country after country, and in all languages, Shakespeare emerges as incomparable.

Hard work makes easy reading or, at least, easier reading.

When something startlingly new comes up, young people, especially, seize it. You can't complain about that. I think its heyday has passed, but it's had an effect and will continue to have an effect.

We worked on solving the problem of voice communications in a noisy military environment. We established military codes that are highly audible and invented selection tests for personnel who had a superior ability to recognize sound in a noisy background.

We are human, and nothing is more interesting to us than humanity.

Key metaphors help determine what and how we perceive and how we think about our perceptions.

If you learn one thing from having lived through decades of changing views, it is that all predictions are necessarily false.

If you read quickly to get through a poem to what it means, you have missed the body of the poem.